A number of AWS services collect and then report various metrics to Amazon CloudWatch. The metrics are stored for two weeks and can be viewed in the AWS Management Console. They can also be used to drive alarms and notifications.

Applications can use CloudWatch’s custom metrics facility to store any desired metrics. These metrics are also stored for two weeks and can be used as described above.

Each Amazon EC2 instance reports a number of metrics to CloudWatch. These metrics are collected and reported by the hypervisor, and as such reflect only the data that the hypervisor can see — CPU load, network traffic, and so forth. In order to report on items that are measured by the guest operating system (Linux or Windows) you need to run a monitoring script on the actual system.

Today we are introducing a set of monitoring scripts for EC2 instances running any supported version of Microsoft Windows Server. The scripts are implemented in Windows PowerShell and are provided in sample form so that you can examine and customize them as needed.